Good to see the priorities of "New" "Old" Labour in action. Gordon "The Man Who Would Be King" Brown has called off a peace mission to the Middle East to hurry back to Blighty to help Blair be tough on civil liberties and the causes of civil liberties.
Now, if Big Brown had any sense, he'd have missed the flight back so that the PM would lose the vote, thus hastening his exit from No 10 and the accession of the dour chancellor. But Brown doesn't have any sense. We know this because he did the famous Granita deal with the Tonester without getting anything in writing saying when the PM would step down. Doh!
One more point about this "90 day without charge" crap. The police are screaming for it but the police failed to stop the 7/7 bombers. (Now, there are all sorts of good reasons why this happened but the bottom line is they failed.) The intelligence services failed to stop the 7/7 bombers.
Quick question: Would the power to hold people without charge for 90 days have prevented the London bombings?
Answer: Of course it bloody wouldn't. If the intelligence services and police had any clue about what these misguided murderous bozos were up to, they would have found something to charge them with. I mean, it's not like there's a loophole somewhere that makes planning to slaughter people legal.
But Tony can't criticise the police because he wants to be "tough on crime". And he can't criticise the intelligence services because he owes them one for taking the blame for his decision to go to war in Iraq in pursuit of WMDs that did not exist.
As for the police using these powers responsibly, well they have the power to shoot people and they don't always use that responsibly now, do they? Do they?
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The fascinating thing about the "arguments" that have been brought forward on behalf of/by the polis really amount to a resources problem, i.e. the amount of man-days that are needed to plough through increasingly-large amounts of information to find the wee nugget that might construct a case against an internee (sorry, detained person). I've yet to hear an argument about the actual time that these enquiries would take, when resources are disregarded. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the liberty of the subject is not a brass pot in a bazaar that it can be haggled over, either.
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